cheer the fuck up, julian

September 12, 1963

We’re in the studio canteen, taking a quick break.

Dhani Harrison-For You Blue

SHARP: Lastly, if you had to choose one photo that most vividly sums up your experience working with the Beatles, what image would you choose and why?

GROSSMAN: I’d choose my picture of George that I call the Hamlet picture. We were sitting at breakfast and George came in and sat down. He’d just gotten up maybe ten minutes before and his hair was messed up. I wasn’t taking pictures at breakfast until I saw the way George looked I reached for my camera and said to him, “George, you may not think you look very interesting right now but I want to take a photo of you.” I said, “You look like what I would expect Hamlet to look like.” Emerson said, “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say”, and that was one of those pictures.

DAY FIFTEEN: THE McCARTNEY/MacMANUS DEMOS

The first record young Declan MacManus ever bought with his own money was “Please Please Me.” Now it was 1987, and he was writing songs with Beatle Paul.

Costello’s songwriting collaboration with Paul McCartney was in many ways a great success— each of them got hit singles out of it ("Veronica" was Costello highest-charting single in the US and "My Brave Face" was McCartney’s last song to break the Top 40) — and yet it never really exploded the way it should have.

Paul McCartney talking about working with Costello (Put It There: The Making Of Flowers In The Dirt, 1989)

I’ve always gotten the impression that this was, on some level, because McCartney got cold feet. He initiated the partnership, and they got a big batch of good-to-great songs out of it, but Costello’s attempt to co-produce McCartney’s Flowers In The Dirt was short-lived and they have never attempted anything like a joint tour or album together. They divvied up most of their songs and spread them out over a handful of solo records, leaving at least two entirely unrecorded. Their one live performance as a duo was at a Royal College Of Music benefit in 1995 (in the presence of Prince Charles.) McCartney suggested they sing perhaps the most mischievously inappropriate of the songs they’d written together, followed by a classic Lennon/McCartney tune: 

"Mistress and Maid" 

"One After 909" 

In a 2011 piece for MOJO magazine, Costello wrote about their songwriting partnership, and went into some detail about the widely-bootlegged demo recordings that the “Two Macs” made together:

"It was his manager of the time who suggested we write together. I took a train down to his studio near Rye and we just went to work. We brought bits and pieces of songs we had been working on that weren’t quite complete. He had one called "Back On My Feet". That was pretty much written. I just sort of made a couple of suggestions, if that’s not too absurd an idea! Truthfully, "Veronica" [1989 single] was the same. It was pretty much written, but there were a couple of key things that he suggested that made it better.”

"Back On My Feet" (McCartney b-side)

"Veronica" (from 1989’s Spike)

Costello is rightfully proud of their work together, even though some of it hasn’t been officially released (a fact that he has occasionally been somewhat prickly about whenever any journalist has been foolish enough to mention how much they love the aforementioned pirated demos.)  

"We wrote 12 songs in total, which is incredible to me. We wrote one called "Tommy’s Coming Home Again", which is a good song, and "So Like Candy" is pretty good. And I love "You Want Her Too" - a dialogue song. He said, “You get all the snarky lines and I get all the nice lines!”

"Tommy’s Coming Home Again" (McCartney/Costello demo)

"So Like Candy"  (McCartney/Costello demo)

"So Like Candy" (Mighty Like A Rose version)

"You Want Her Too" (McCartney/Costello demo)

"You Want Her Too"  (Flowers In The Dirt duet)

Listening to the leaked demo recordings of McCartney/Costello performing as a duo is both thrilling and deeply frustrating. One can imagine how great it would be if they just went into a studio for a few days with a couple of acoustic guitars and cut a whole album together. Costello even acknowledges that their demos captured something that some of the eventual solo studio versions of these songs failed to:

"The real lost gem from that batch of songs - one of these days one of us should cut it - is "The Lovers That Never Were". In its original condition, it’s like something Dusty Springfield or Jackie DeShannon would have recorded. Paul straightened it out in the studio [for 1993’s Off The Ground album] and wanted it to go a different way, but the demo is, I’d say, one of the great vocal performances of his solo career. He’s standing up playing a twelve-string guitar and, weirdly enough, I’m playing piano, just thinking, “Don’t fuck up! He’s really singing this!” He’s singing a ballad in the voice of I’m Down! He’s right over my shoulder singing all this wild, distorted stuff! I had never heard him do that before.”

"The Lovers That Never Were" (McCartney/Costello demo)

Costello coaxed McCartney into embracing a little bit of his “Beatles” heritage, a musical language that he had essentially avoided during his Wings and solo era. In addition to convincing McCartney to use his Hofner bass, you can hear a familiar kind of gorgeous vocal harmony on their demo for “Don’t Be Careless Love.” McCartney obliged him for their own recording, but when it came time to put it on his own album, he went another direction.

"He did a vocal on another song that we wrote called "Don’t Be Careless Love", which is the other end of his vocal dynamic range. Incredibly wired singing, half-falsetto. It’s extraordinary singing - one take. We’d sort of had a bit of a disagreement about the way another track should go and he said, “Let’s leave it for a minute and I’ll just do some singing.” He went in, put the headphones on and sang that. I was like, “Oh… I’ll just shut up about what I think the other song should be like.” I can’t compete with that.”

"Don’t Be Careless Love" (McCartney/Costello demo)

"Don’t Be Careless Love" (Flowers In The Dirt version)

It’s important to note that their collaboration doesn’t seem to have ended with any bad feeling whatsoever. Costello and McCartney have remained friends, and will occasionally cross paths personally and professional, sometimes under rather unusual circumstances, such as when McCartney received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular song in 2010. Costello marveled at how McCartney put people at ease under some potentially nerve-wracking circumstances:

"When we played the White House, he sat through the dress rehearsal in the front row, all afternoon. It cut the nerves and intimidation by half. As we were queuing up in the Blue Room to meet the president, we were in a line and Herbie Hancock is in front of me and the Jonas Brothers are behind me with Jack White and Karen Elson. I will love Karen Elson always for saying what we were all thinking: [adopts Mancunian burr] "Hey Jack, isn’t this cool?!" We were all trying to be really matter-of-fact about it, but, yes, it was really fucking cool. We’re playing the fucking White House with Paul McCartney. You’re kidding me!"

LIVE from the East Room of The White House:

Elvis Costello: "Penny Lane"

Paul McCartney: "Michelle/Eleanor Rigby/Let It Be/Hey Jude" 

I’m always hopeful that Costello and McCartney will get back together and pick up where they left off, writing a few more songs and then making a whole album together. In his 2011 MOJO article, Costello confirmed that this is actually still a possibility:

"We got together not so long ago, in the last six, seven years and said, ‘We should do something with these.’ We had half an idea to write a few more or tidy them up in some way. Both of us were working on other records, but somewhere there’s a piece of paper with it all written out, a plan. He wrote it out twice. He handed me a copy, put a copy in a book and put it back on a shelf, like a contract."

Getting to write songs with Paul McCartney was undeniably one of the most amazing things to ever happen to Elvis Costello, an ACTUAL childhood fantasy come true. I get the impression that if Sir Paul asked Costello to go into the studio with him tomorrow morning and put a record out by nightfall, Costello would be there 40 minutes early with ideas for 12 new songs. 

"My Brave Face" (Flowers In The Dirt promo video)

"My Brave Face" (McCartney/Costello demo)

"That Day Is Done" (Flowers In The Dirt version)

"That Day is Done" (Elvis Costello with The Fairfield Four)

Back in 1989, Costello was getting ready to start a new, ambitious phase of his recording career. Paul McCartney would be on the record, playing bass on two tracks. Things were going well.